Heart of the World
by ReidsFanGirl18
Summary: What is love, really? It is the willingness to put someone else's life, needs, happiness, wellbeing, before your own, even if it means putting yourself at risk... Reid and Meave are each about to learn that the hard way. When a young FBI agent, asks for the help of a lonely, hunted, geneticist.
1. When Will My Life Begin?

Chapter 1: When Will My Life Begin?

April 21st 2012 6:00 AM

It was early in the morning, in a cold, laboratory, a young geneticist sat at her computer, going back and forth between working, being exceedingly bored, and letting her anxiety get the better of her. Her reddish brown hair fell down her back from the high-set pony tail she had pulled it into before leaving her apartment that morning. The lights were dim, only half of them had been lit, she stared at her computer screen, only occasionally peering down at a collection of datasheets sitting on the desk in front of her.

6:30 AM

Maeve Donovan, was in her lab at Mendel University, on the fourth-floor of the science building, trying, and failing to keep her mind on her work, and off of the strange shadow that had begun to follow her literally everywhere she went. She was working on organizing the data from her last project, trying to put it into an organizational form that her colleagues would be able to interpret so that the study she and her team had done could be replicated in other labs around the country and across the world. It was fairly dry work, looking at the same data she'd been working with for months, not the sort of thing that could take her mind off what her life had become. It had only been about a month since she'd begun to get the sense that she was being watched, only two weeks, since someone, likely the same person who was following her, had begun to bombard her email account with threatening messages; then, most recently, whoever it was had sent pictures of her, with her fiancé, Bobby, at the park, walking home together.

As a result, partly at least, she'd decided to break off the engagement, in reality though, they'd been drifting apart since he'd proposed, for a whole list of reasons, she'd had to admit it to herself, Bobbly simply wasn't the one, they were compatible on paper, but there was no chemistry left between them, and given that, as her own situation only seemed to grow more dangerous by the day, it wasn't worth it anymore, to drag him through this with her. The truth was though, that she would've broken up with him anyway…eventually…this had just provided the justification and urgency she'd needed to convince herself to go through with it. The look his eyes had been terrible, she'd never intended to hurt him. She just…had to do it, mainly because of her stalker but not entirely, she just hoped someday he'd understand that.

What she needed right now, what she craved, was work that her mind could sink its teeth into, work that could get her mind away from her own worries and back on helping other people. Little did she know that that was precisely what she was about to get.

…

April 20th 11:45 PM

Reid closed his front door behind him, dropped his messenger bag on the sofa, and tried to ignore the increasingly intense throbbing in his head. That case had been rough, and he couldn't concentrate anymore the way he used to. His migraines, and the ever increasing pain, light and sound sensitivity, and insomnia that came along with them, had become his near constant companion. He hoped the others didn't notice just how bad this was getting, he hoped they didn't realize that this was the reason behind his sunglasses, or that it now required a double, or even triple-shot espresso just to keep him awake and allow him to think clearly. He had told Emily and Morgan, about the headaches he'd been having, he'd even admitted to Morgan that they were making focus and sleep almost impossible, he knew that Hotch had known for months, having guessed on his own the first time it had become almost impossible to hide, but he was grateful to his superior for not having pressed the issue.

The longer it went on, the more he just tried to live with it and get on with his days as usual, the worse it became. Without warning, the room began to tilt, and his stomach lurched… just as it had on the plane during every takeoff and landing for the last several months, but this was the first time it had happened on the ground, and the first time it had happened twice in one day… now he was scared.

_Calm down…get it together… _he thought ho himself. _Panicking only makes it even worse, you know that… _He told himself in his head, over and over. He tried to keep it at the front of his mind, that despite everything, an answer might finally be within reach. He had a name, a first name anyway, of a geneticist who may be able to help him, and mercifully, she lived in the same city, he had left a message for her on the phone in the office connected to her lab. He had the weekend off, he silently begged her to call him sometime in the next two days, so that finally, he could find out what was wrong, maybe even make it stop, for good…

Until then, there was only one thing to do…attempt to get some rest… Since this was arguably the single worst migraine yet, he took the unusual step of downing a dose of Excedrin before bed, given the fact that Excedrin did carry the risk of addiction, and given one of the darker episodes in his own past, he used it, but sparingly, only when it, whatever it was, was at its absolute worst, did he even dare touch the bottle. Then he stumbled to his bedroom, exchanged his work clothes for his favorite green pajama pants and a T-shirt, before rolling back the blankets and allowing himself to collapse onto his soft mattress. He sighed in relief as the medicine started to take effect, the pain reduced to a dull throb, and the dizziness, nausea, and sensitivity to light began to subside, for a while at least. If he got lucky, maybe it would last long enough for him to drift out of consciousness and then maybe he could get some actual sleep that night.


	2. I'm Going Slightly Mad

Chapter 2: I'm Going Slightly Mad

April 21st 7:00 AM

Once Maeve had finished the data analysis and sent it to her department head, she decided to check her messages. She hit the button on her answering machine with the eraser of the pencil she'd been using.

"You have three new messages…" came the automated voice. "First unheard message:"

"Maeve honey, it's your mother… I just wanted to make sure you're ok, call me back if you want to come over for dinner tonight, your father and I would love to have you…bye…"

_That was nice of her… _Maeve thought. _Maybe I should go home for dinner… _

"Second unheard message:"

"Dr. Donovan, I was just wondering how soon you might be able to send me those datasheets…" came her boss's voice.

_I literally just emailed them to you _Maeve thought.

"Third unheard message:" the machine repeated again.

"Hi, my name is Spencer Reid…you don't know me but, I could actually use your help, I've been dealing migraines for over a year now, so far, no one I've talked to has been able to figure out why, let alone how to make them stop. I got your number from an old friend of mine who is familiar with your work, he thought that you might be able to help me…please call me back at 702-555-0103…bye…"

That was interesting, she hadn't done a case study in a while, and she loved helping people… there was something about this man, there had been an almost pleading quality to his voice, yet a humbleness, as if there was a part of him that didn't actually expect her to take his case. Of course she would, finally, something she could do to help someone else, instead of just worrying about her own life…

She played the message again, and wrote down the callback number he'd left her.

…

Spencer Reid's Apartment: April 21st 7:00 AM

When Spencer woke the next morning, it was already seven, most people wouldn't consider that to be having slept in, but for him, it was an hour and a half more than he got on a workday at the best of times. There was just something about sleeping until you would have already been at work on any other day. While he still didn't feel all that great, he pretty much never did these days, he still felt a lot better than he had the previous night. So he got up, made himself a cup of espresso, and decided to delve into the myriad of large books and anthologies he'd gotten from his friends and family for his birthday several months earlier. He just hadn't got around to reading them because most of them were well…massive, so he hadn't brought them with him on away cases for those long plane rides, or sleepless nights in his hotel room, they were simply too big to carry in his messenger bag, and these days, he often returned home without the energy to do so.

He was just getting into chapter five in the latest neuroscience textbook, a gift from a former professor he'd kept in contact with over the years, the same friend who had given him Maeve's number, after explaining that due to some extenuating circumstances, he could only give him her first name. Suddenly, his cellphone started to buzz and ring. He set the book on the coffee table and grabbed it.

"H-hello?" He answered.

"Um..Hi…This is… Maeve…responding to the message you left me." She replied.

They both sounded unsure, almost nervous.

"Yes…Hi…so um…does this mean…?" Reid asked, but she finished the question before he got the chance.

"Does this mean I'm going to help you? I'm certainly going to try…" she told him.

"Thank you, thank you so much…" he replied gratefully.

There was something about her, something Reid couldn't pinpoint, there seemed to be this strange electricity between them, a chemistry that the situation at hand didn't bring to the table.

"You're welcome…Anyway, just because a doctor or even several can't figure it out doesn't mean there's nothing wrong…if your migraines are caused by something genetic, we'll find it… now… you said this has been going on for over a year…right?" she asked.

Without knowing how he knew it, Reid guessed that whatever was going on in her life, whatever was the cause behind her wanting to make herself as hard to find as possible to those who she wasn't already familiar with, was the reason that though she had sensed it too, she seemed, for the time being at least, prepared to ignore it. That was fine, that was a conversation for a later date anyway, if it was to be one at all.

"Since September of two-thousand ten…" he replied, answering the question she'd asked.

"Ok, first things first, we need to narrow down the list of possibilities, for that… I'm going to need you to gather some information for me…" she told him.

"Like what?" he asked, half out of necessity and half out of academic interest, the scientist in him curious to know what sorts of things geneticists took into account.

"Like timeline, exact symptom list, medical and family history…plus as much information as possible about what the people who have already tried to figure out what the problem is, did and didn't look for…if we can narrow it down to a shorter list of possibilities, we can test for them and see what comes up positive…"

"Ok, yeah I can do that…"

"Good…"

"Is there anything that you've noticed since this all started?"

"Well…it's only gotten worse over time…I get more of them and they're more painful than before…"

"ok, that's a start…" she said. "Tell you what, I'm going to give you the address of my mailbox at the university, when you gather the information I asked you to find, go ahead and send it to me that way… I know that's a little weird these days but I for one prefer to have a hard copy in front of me…"

"I like hard copies too…it's ironic really, computers were supposed to make things faster, but they just slow me down…" he replied.

At that, something in the mood between them changed, and though they couldn't see each other, they both found themselves smiling and knew the other one was too.


	3. Little Drop of Poison

Chapter 3: Little Drop of Poison

Maeve received Spencer's file a week later, it had arrived first at her university mailbox, where she'd asked him to send it, but her own situation had grown more precarious in the last seven days, so she had officially taken a sabbatical from the university, so she'd gone in disguise to retrieve the file earlier that morning. Maeve couldn't quite explain why she was so determined, but…she didn't care what it took, stalker or no stalker, she was going to get to the bottom of this…

The file contained everything she'd asked for, his medical history, a family tree, including everyone's cause of death and all medical information relevant to all natural deaths that weren't the result of old age, of which there weren't very many, full reports of everything the doctors he'd been to previously for this had suspected, and everything they'd tried, and it contained an original MRI scan taken roughly this time last year. Based on the sheer quantity of medical paperwork, it became clear to her that he had been trying to find an answer for a while, it was no wonder he'd sounded almost disheartened when she'd spoken to him on the phone. Hopefully, somewhere in the file in front of her, there were patterns, clues as to what had changed a year and a half ago that put him in such constant pain.

She decided to start with the family tree… from the beginning. The tree went up roughly eight generations and almost three-hundred years on either side… This would prove useful. If his migraines were caused by a genetic condition, it was probably rare, which meant that it was most likely recessive, which meant that it could've lain dormant for generations until someone inherited two copies of the malfunctioning gene. She laid the sheets out on her coffee table, the ancestry chart next to the records of all non-old age deaths, and examined them carefully. Something told her that somewhere in the documents in front of her, was the first clue, but what was it? Past generations had been mostly healthy and long lived, with some disturbances thanks to illnesses that had been endemic only seventy years ago, no surprises there… It probably wasn't the result of cultural/environmental deficiencies either, different branches of his family had come from different areas of the world, mostly Europe, but still all over the place… so any environmental factors that would've effected the epigenome would have been balanced out by other relatives and therefore wouldn't cause a problem… so what was it? Finally she saw it, there was an uncle on his father's side, who had died at just thirty years old… Daniel Reid had lived from November 1955 to December 1985… there was no record of an accident occurring, he hadn't been murdered… the official cause of death for this guy was a stroke, unusual for a man of his age… She checked his file, there was no record of cancer or poisoning or any other medical reason for a man who was barely thirty to die that way…

That's when her cellphone phone started to ring. Something else had changed, the things were beginning to get more personal between them, of course she hadn't given him her cellphone number, but all the calls to her office phone were being automatically forwarded to it. She still hadn't told him she was taking a sabbatical or why. She knew if this kept up she'd have to. She was really starting to like him, but she felt certain that this stalker, whoever he was, would harm anyone she got too close to, and she wasn't about to put him in danger too.

"Hello…?" She answered it.

"Hi Maeve, it's me…" he replied.

"Hi…how's it going?" she asked.

"Pretty good…." He replied exhaustedly.

"You ok?" she asked.

"Yeah…I just got home, that's all… long case, there were two all-nighters in there…not that I sleep that well regardless…"

"You do realize, that no matter what's causing this, chances are good that sleep deprivation is probably making it worse…"

"I know, but it's kind of unavoidable…speaking of which…have you found anything yet?"

Maeve thought for a second, she didn't want to hide anything from him, but she didn't understand yet what the little she'd uncovered so far meant, and she didn't think it was fair to scare him.

"I'm just getting started, I received the file this morning, I literally just got into it…"

"Ok…do you see anything so far?"

"Nothing anywhere near definitive…think about it, if the answer were common or easy to find, someone would've figured it out by now. The first thing that struck me, is just how hard you've been trying to figure this out…" She told him. "But anything I do find out, once I actually know for sure that it's going to lead us somewhere…you'll be the first to know."

"Say, I was wondering…" he began hesitantly.

"Yes…?" she asked.

"Would you, like to go for coffee sometime…with me…?" he asked.

"Oh Spencer…I would love to…" she replied, with an almost lamenting tone in her voice.

"But…" he began, knowing that she was turning him down.

"But I can't…listen…I would love to meet you in person, but…I have a stalker, I don't know who it is, or what I did to get this guy on my case, but I'm afraid…whoever it is has threatened me repeatedly and I don't know what he might do to the people I care about but I don't want to find out. So until this is over, until this guy leaves me alone…we can't…"

"Um, Maeve…I'm an FBI agent… my team and I arrest people like him. I could just tell my team what's going on and we could help you…"

"No, Spencer…I already told the police, hopefully they'll catch him soon, and this will all be over, and then…when it is, I would love to meet for coffee. Until then…I think its best that we stick to…" but she stopped short, as her landline phone had just begun to ring.

"What is that?" Reid asked. "Maeve…are you ok? What's that noise?"

"That's um…my landline…I've had all my office calls rerouted to my cellphone. No one uses that landline…not my parents, none of my friends, not my boss… no one calls me on that number…it never rings…"

"I hate to say it, but you're stalker might have somehow gotten your number…"

"Oh God…"

"Maeve…listen to me, put on a disguise, get out of there…turn your cellphone off, and call me back from the nearest payphone…If I don't hear from you in an hour I'm calling my team's tech analyst to trace this call and sending the police to your address…Do you understand…?"

"Yes….yes I understand…"

"Good…"

"Talk to you soon…bye…"

"Bye…"


	4. Paper Plane

Chapter 4: Paper Plane

Spencer waited in tense, worried, anticipation, pacing the length of his living room nervously, peering down at his cellphone now and then, making sure that it was still on, the volume was still such that it would ring.

Minutes passed like hours, and he came closer and closer to just calling Garcia, asking her to trace the call, and explaining later. Honestly… his instincts were still screaming at him to do just that, and getting louder the more time went by. Until, finally, after half an hour, his phone rang at last. He picked it up, the number was unknown. It could be her… He picked it up.

"H-hello…"

"Spencer…it's me…." She told him. "I'm at a pay phone about six blocks from my apartment…"

"Good…now I need you to look around you…is there anyone watching you a little too closely? Maybe someone you've seen other places but don't actually know?" he asked. He neglected to tell her that he was trying to determine if her stalker had followed her there. If the Unsub had, they might pick up of Maeve's anxiety, realize she was onto them and do something violent. "Just stay calm, and scan the area…" he told her.

Maeve stuck her head out of the phone booth and peered around the deserted street corner.

"Spencer, this place is deserted, there's no one here but me." She told him.

"Good…now I want you to stay where you are for an hour or so, if the stalker was nearby we want them to get bored and leave. When you go home…don't disconnect the landline…"

"Why not?" she asked. "I don't want that creep calling me…"

"I know Maeve, but listen…you have to be careful how you proceed with a stalker, if you reject their advances too strongly that will only enrage them and put you in a dangerous situation. You don't have to answer, you can let it go to the answering machine, in fact you should, but you shouldn't cut off completely the line of communication the stalker is trying to use…" he told her. He sighed deeply, reminding himself that for the moment at least, she was still safe, before continuing on… "Please, I know it's hard for you right now, and I know we haven't known each other for very long…but I'm trying to protect you…and without knowing where you are, all I can do is teach you what I know about suspects like this, to try and keep whoever this guy is from hurting you…"

Though Maeve tried to hold back so that Spencer wouldn't notice on the other end of the phone… she found herself beginning to cry.

"It…it's alright, I know…I know you're trying to help…and I know it's probably not a good idea to make this creep too angry, not while he can still get to me…" she paused, took a deep breath, and calmed herself down. "I just have one question…" she told him.

"What is it? He asked.

"What about us? What about our line of communication? The number you have is my office phone, which now gets re-routed to my cell. How long before the stalker gets those numbers too? What if he hacks my account? Goes through my phone records? Once he has that, he has my friends, my parents, you…"

"Calm down, the first thing you should do is change your cellphone number…get a new email address, making it harder for him to invade your life more than he already has… As for us, what do you want to do about it?" he asked. "I mean that's…completely up to you…"

He said it in a tone that told Maeve that he was every bit as scared of losing her as she was of him getting hurt.

"I…I don't think we should call each other any more for a while…but we can still stay in contact, through snail mail… I'll set up a PO box, then I'll send you a letter with that address along with a new cellphone number… from now on, at least for the time being, we write to each other, we do not call, unless it's time sensitive or an emergency? Agreed?"

"Agreed…"


	5. Blue

Chapter 5: Blue

After that phone call, Reid and Maeve stayed connected by writing to each other, sending three letters a week back and forth. While they missed the sound of each other's voice, while each would have a sudden burst of joy and excitement each time their phone would ring, and find themselves sorely disappointed when they saw that it wasn't, as if they were crashing from an adrenalin high, they each reminded themselves every time, that what they were doing, was about keeping each other safe.

Maeve spent most of her time in the coming weeks, trying to come up with a short list of possible explanations for Spencer's migraines. It was becoming more and more likely that his uncle's stroke had been the end result of a genetic condition that manifests itself at the early stages, in headaches that much like the ones Spencer described. The rest of the symptoms he'd been experiencing and the timeline also fit with this hypothesis. But, that was far from reassuring. Thirty years ago, there was nothing that could be done for the unfortunate few unlucky enough to be born genetically predisposed to the condition she had in mind, now it was easily treatable. Once he got to the final stages of the disease, it would be too late, and if she was right, then that meant he'd already been symptomatic for well over a year…they were running out of time…just two months remained, to confirm or dispel her suspicions, and if it was confirmed, put him in contact with a specialist who could help from there, someone who would get him on medication that would get rid of his symptoms and reverse the disease, thereby saving his life. Considering it could take up to a month to get the results of the DNA screening, that wasn't a lot of time.

…

Reid, was getting lonelier by the day, not only was his correspondence with Maeve reduced to letter writing, but Emily had decided to return to Interpol to run the office in London, and Morgan and Garcia were in Brittan on a temporary assignment, leaving him with JJ, Hotch, and Rossi. Garcia's ex-boyfriend Kevin, was filling in for her as their tech analyst, but he was certainly no Garcia. What's more, hiding his migraines from the rest of the team was getting more and more difficult by the day. He tried to aim his desk lamp as far away from his direct line of sight as possible without it seeming too out of the ordinary as to raise an alarm, and it helped some…but his head still pounded, and his eyes still ached. In the back of his mind, he knew that it was hurting his ability to get through his mounting paperwork at his normal speed of doing so. At this point he should already be done with his own paperwork, and would normally be offering to help his teammates with their work load. Instead, he still had a pile the size a five subject spiral remaining; which in his frustration might as well have been the height of a small child for the amount which it dismayed him.

"Hey…Spence?" It took the sound of JJ's voice to jar Reid from his own thoughts back to awareness of his surroundings.

"Huh?" He asked, only barely having heard her, and having not registered what she said.

"Are you ok?" She asked.

"I'm fine…" he lied. He could tell she didn't buy it, but for all sorts of reasons he just…couldn't open that can of worms.

"Well I'm making a coffee run, do you want anything?" She offered.

"Um…an espresso? Triple shot, two spoons of sugar…?"

"You got it…" she said happily, before heading off the break room.

Once he was absolutely certain that JJ was out of ear shot, he gave a small sigh of relief. that had been a close one. JJ obviously knew that something was wrong, he'd seen her come to that realization at various times in the last year and a half or so, but so far, she hadn't questioned him about it.

…

By the time she got to the breakroom coffee bar, JJ was so nervous and frustrated that she barely noticed when she starting pouring hot coffee on her own hand.

"Darn it!" she exclaimed, wincing at the scalding hot coffee on her hand, quickly using the other to grab a paper towel and wipe it off.

She was worried about Reid, she couldn't understand what was going on with him. Something was obviously wrong, he was never this slow doing paperwork, but she knew that if she pushed too hard, he'd just shut down. She'd known him long enough that that's how Reid reacted when you put him on the spot like that, when you pushed too far on something that he didn't want to talk about.

She sighed, poured cups of coffee for herself and a double-shot espresso for Reid, and headed back to the bull pen, when she did, she saw Reid rummaging in his desk drawer for something.

"Here…" JJ said, setting the cup of espresso down on his desk.

He looked up. "Thanks…"

"You're welcome…say, what exactly are you looking for in there?" she asked.

"I seem to have misplaced my favorite pen…" he said, in a matter of fact tone, avoiding making eye contact so that JJ wouldn't pick up on the lie. Actually it wasn't technically a lie, he had misplaced his favorite pen; that just wasn't what he was looking for at that particular moment.

"Ok, well…hope you find it…" she said, not actually believing him, and went back to her desk.

A couple of hours later, while JJ was up in Hotch's office turning in her pile of paperwork, that Reid, once again, started digging through his desk drawer in search of the small bottle of Excedrin he'd kept there for the last year, for emergencies only. He finally found it, the small white bottle of the only thing he'd found, strong enough to temporarily help stop the pounding inside his skull.

The question was, how to sneak a dose? While they had never actually admitted it exactly, at least not in a way anyone outside of their own team would understand, Reid knew that the rest of the team, except perhaps Rossi, were well aware of his previous addiction to dilaudid, the results of being held, beaten, tortured, and dosed with it at the hands of one Tobias Henkel and the alter-personality of his abusive father. Since then, he'd been extremely careful about what medications he put into his body for any reason. He had to be, if anything, Tobias had proven that Reid was vulnerable to addiction, even when exposure wasn't by choice, and especially if it happened under stress. As profilers, JJ and Hotch would know that this was a weakness of his, if either of them saw him now, it would only raise even more red flags. Finally he decided that his best bet, was just to be quick about it. So he took a dose, chased it with coffee, and shoved the bottle of pills back into the drawer. He looked up, carefully scanning the office around him, JJ was still up in Hotch's office…good, she hadn't seen anything…

That's when his cellphone started to ring. The number on the caller ID was the same one Maeve had given him her first letter. Puzzled, he answered it.

"Hello?"

"Spencer…Hi…It's me…" she replied.

"It's not that I'm not happy to hear from you, this is great, but what's going on, are you ok?"

"Yes…"

"Good, you scared me you know…" he told her, sighing in relief…

"I know, I'm sorry, but listen we need to talk…are you alone?" she asked.

"I'm at work, but for the moment, relatively speaking…"

"I think I figured out what's been causing your migraines, and if I'm right… we need to get it confirmed so I can put you in contact with a neurologist…the only way to confirm, is to run your DNA for the mutation that would cause what I'm talking about…" she explained, intentionally leaving out the name of the condition in question, she didn't want him to look it up and scare himself with outdated information before they even knew for sure that, that was what was going on.

…

When JJ came down the stairs back toward her desk, she found Reid on his cellphone, talking in a hushed tone. She could hear his voice, but couldn't make out what he was saying. Who could it be? If it were Garcia, Morgan, or Emily, he wouldn't be acting so secretive about it, if anything, he'd probably have them on speaker phone, was it about his mom? Someone else in his family? Did whatever whoever he was talking to was saying have anything to do with why he'd been acting so strangely lately? JJ didn't know, but whether he wanted her to or not, she was going to find out…


End file.
